Art Criticism
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Volume 16, Number 2 ART CRITICISM Art Criticislll vol. 16, no. 2 r Art Department State University of New York at Stony Brook Stony Brook, NY 11794-5400 The editor wishes to thank Art and Peace, The Stony Brook Founda tion, President Shirley Strumm Kenny, Provost Robe11 L. McGrath, and the Acting Dealt of The College ~f Arts and Sciences, Robert Lieberman, for their gracious support. Copyright 2001State University of New York at Stony Brook ISSN: 0195-4148 2 Art Criticism Founding Co-Editors Lawrence Alloway and Donald B. Kuspit Editor ' Donald B. Kuspit Advisors lames Rubin MelPekarsky Managing Editor Craig Peariso Business Editor Meredith Moody » Art Criticism is published by: Department of Art State University of New York at Stony Brook Stony Brook, NY 11794-5400 Prospective contributors are asked to send abstracts. However, if a manuscript is submitted, please include a self-addressed stamped envelope for its return. Manuscripts accepted for publication must be submitted on a PC computer disk. Please contact the managing editor for a style sheet. Subscriptions are $20 per volume (two issues) for institutions and $15 per volume for individuals in the continental United States ($20 outside the continental U.S.). Back issues are available at the rate of $1 0 per issue. vol. 16, no. 2 3 4 Art Criticism Table of Contents Toys Are Us: Toys and the Childlike in Recent Art Eva Forgacs 6 Jackson Pollock, Three Theoretical Sources, and Rosalind Krauss's "Six" Michael Peglau 22 Why Women Can't Paint Stephen Newton 52 Critique of Cynical Criticism Mark Van Pro yen 62 The Psychoanalytic Construction of Beauty Donald Kuspit 101 vol. 16, no. 2 5 Toys are Us: Toys and the Childlike in Recent Art Eva Forgacs Because they are visceral and relate to long-forgotten, long-suppressed expe rience, toys are exceptionally powerful vehicles of communication. Their im ages plumb the darkest pits of memory, making their way directly into the unconscious long before we can articulate what they stand for. But while their instantaneous power has made them frequent components of literature and film, they did not, until the last decade and a half, appear with any regularity in the fine arts l . Now post-Pop Art childhood references are inundating the art scene, and artists have dramatically smashed the remaining notions of purity and innocence which, though long since challenged by writers and psycho analysis, still remained attached to childhood. Childhood, a mere 200-year-old invention of adults, has been redis covered and frequently revisited in art. After all the great novels and painted portraits of children of past centuries, toys have been selected to address a vast complexity of cultural issues reflecting a new kind of vulnerability, psy chological awareness, and self-reflection. The present wave of toys and the childlike in art is not the first time in Western culture when images of childhood have mediated regression, or long ing for regression. The idea and cult of childhood first appeared along with the critique of culture at the time of the Enlightenment. At the same time when Kant argued for the newly acquired maturity that "the public use of one's reason"2 can establish, the anti-rationalist concept of the child as genius, free of the corruption perpetrated by culture, was introduced by Rousseau and was fur ther cultivated by Goethe. Generations of reform pedagogues based their meth ods on saving the "innate genius" of children. Romanticism saw childhood as the entirety of the possibilities any human being has ahead in life. Freud and Proust, the expressionists, and the surrealists were all intent on fathoming childhood. The child was discovered inside the adult as the bottom of his ego, his primitive, authentic, primordial core of uncorrupted sensitivity. The work of the few artists I refer to here are but samples from an ocean of toy-based art works. These works have been widely and adequately interpreted; but not, or only few of them, put in the perspective of the history of our culture. In what follows I will examine toy-based art works in the context of some of the cultural currents which might not be highlighted had this art not existed; and in the historic context of traumatic events such as the Nazi holo caust that resist rationalization. 6 Art Criticism Christian Boltanski, after creating a series of toy-based works in the late 1960s, started to build up his works of children's re-photographed photo portraits in the early I 970s. It took him a few years to realize that the sense of loss he associated with the loss oflife symbolized by the loss of childhood was in fact related to the holocaust. Images of childhood in his works stand for this ,unnamable trauma. Every child portrait that Boltanski mounts on the wall is a memorial and has the potential to become an accusation. His private loss - the deprivation of an un hidden family history and peace of mind in what Lipot Szondy calls the "family unconscious" - and the historic loss signify one another and point to one another. The loss of childhood and the loss of life declare the loss of a Europe that had existed only prior to the Nazi holocaust. When he juxtaposes the idyllic frills and smiles typical of middle-class family photography with images evoking the highly organized industry of killing, as in Archives (1987), Boltanski comes up with the iconography of the central narrative of Western culture in this century. This narrative has remained suppressed in the visual arts, which is why an open reference to it, like Zbigniew Libera's LEGO Concentration Camp Set (1996), caused such scandal. Invited by Lego among a few other artists to create a work of art of their building blocks, the Polish artist used Lego bricks and packed them into authentic-looking Lego boxes with false serial numbers for a Lego set complete with barracks, barbed wire, skeletons, guards, gallows, and remains of bodies, all neat and tidy as any other Lego set meant for chil dren to play with to develop their sense of construction and space. The work had to be withdrawn from the] 997 Venice Biennale as "explosive material that treats too frivolously one of the darkest moments in European civilization."3 The work was dismissed as anti-Semitic, although that it was certainly not. An obvious allusion to Nazi camps, it could also be read as one of Stalin's concen tration camps, or one in Cambodia, Bosnia, or Rwanda. What is really chilling about this work is that it actually conveys what Hungarian writer Imre Kertesz called "The Holocaust As Culture": awareness of industrialized genocide me diated into the fabric of quotidian life. As the TV announcer does not miss a beat between giving the news of terrorism or genocide and the weather fore cast, the little Lego bricks can also connect up to form a charming red-roofed cottage or a horrendous scene of mass execution. Lego aptly visualizes the structures we operate with: it is the same small particles all over that connect up to become life or death. The work is to be seen in a local context, too: "The Lego collection", Libera said, "is neither anti-Semitic nor irreverent, but a provo cation about child rearing, social norms and the cultural cacophony that the free market has brought to formerly communist Eastern Europe."4 Libera's work is as scandalous as any real truth: the adults' games do not spare children any more, in any part of the world.s Moreover, Libera's Lego set is politically vol. 16, no. 2 7 idiosyncratic: If he was not willing to yield to communist ideology, he would not comply with corporate thinking, either. Two of David Levinthal's several polaroid photo series featuring toys, Hitler Moves East (1977) and Mein Kampj(1994), did not create scandal, be cause they framed their subject matter historically rather than directly linking them to the culture of the present. Although the availability of toy soldiers in Nazi uniform with swastika armbands, not to mention toy Hitlers, could have been alarming, they were seen as documentary objects of the past. Using toys, which relate to every viewer's early and intimate experience, to enact Nazi atrocities, Levinthal's blurred polaroids, like Libera's Lego sets, suggest that toys, like the various components of the culture or the psyche, are bricks that· can connect up to produce formations that may be fundamentally opposed to, or out of the control of the culture that had produced them. The Neo-expressionism of the 1980s deliberately reached back to the childlike. Precursors of the period like JOrg Immendorff and A.R. Penck com municated their political Weltgeftihl when, still in the cold war atmosphere, they regressed to the use of stick figures and simplified, childlike language as a sign of distancing themselves from the "adult" world, and to express their helplessness in the face of its machinery. Seen from this perspective, much of the new expressionism of the I 980s involved sophisticated adults who faked naivete. Jean-Michel Basquiat with all his outburst of genuine painterliness, was informed by, and indebted to, the acquired childishness of, among others, Jean Dubuffet; while the child like simplicity of Keith Haring suggested a quest of commonality as well as a sense of narcissistic self-pity. Self-pity and narcissism were in the air: one had only to recognize their visual expressions. Rene Ricard depicted his favorite Francesco Clemente in his 1981 essay "The Radiant Child." He singled out a Clemente picture of a frog in a green pond as the "preservation of a lost moment from childhood, perfectly seen and remembered in a flash," and claimed that it was exactly this flashed childhood moment that "sets this picture apart as art."6 But he was most of all moved by Keith Haring's The Radiant Child.